“... The future isn’t what it used to be. In one of William Gibson’s first published stories, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, a photographer is assigned to capture examples of ‘futuristic’ American design from the Thirties, the kind of dream architecture that graced the covers of pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories ...”

“... the simple life, it never quite chases the shadows of cruelty and corruption away, and what William Empson called the trick of simplification was always the thing. The mode kept remembering what it was ostensibly getting rid of. Charles Portis’s funny and violent novel True Grit (1968) is the perfect pastoral of the ungallant west. It presents a world ...”

“... sitters can resemble figures by Nadar or Julia Margaret Cameron. Some of them were famous – William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, John Giorno – or soon to be: Hujar recorded successive generations of downtown scenesters, including Gary Indiana, Fran Lebowitz and Cookie Mueller. Even if he had been only a portraitist, Hujar’s work would be an essential ...”

“... Yet one wants more in the end, perhaps, than silly-pastoral and the fleeting satisfactions of camp. The case for reading Secresy has to be made on more compelling grounds. One might begin by pointing, as Fenwick’s editor Isobel Grundy does (somewhat briefly) in her Introduction, to Secresy’s broader historical significance: what it reveals about the ...”

“... wasn’t unprecedented: Lincoln presented the arguments of the Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison in the 1836 presidential campaign.) In a 1948 primary campaign, Harold Stassen and Thomas Dewey debated the outlawing of the American Communist Party on national radio. The idea of a televised presidential debate was proposed in 1959 by ...”

“... to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front found themselves in the same training camp in Sound Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other, only 15 years old, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire. When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for girls, Disney stayed in ...”

“... Chase, plus ten English fags. To my surprise he jumped at the chance and I became the owner of William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, and of Peru. A great work, but the only trouble was the thought of having to hump it around when we moved. But I said to myself that I would think about that when the time came, and got down to some serious ...”

“... Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself. ‘You’re wounded!’ ‘Nay,’ the soldier’s pride Touched to the quick, he ...”

“... eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn – I enjoy merely writing the words’. The words are what counted, and they ...”

“... announced in his newspaper column that he had decided to call his Homosexual Law Reform Bill ‘William’. This was partly because it was about ‘boys’, partly because it was his custom in restaurants to ask for ‘William’ instead of the bill, but giving the Bill a pet name also seems to have been an attempt to ...”

“... their say. There are essays from many of the old Partisan crowd, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, William Barrett, Philip Rahv; a compassionate reminiscence from Harry Levin, who was much abused by Schwartz when they were neighbours in Cambridge in 1940; there are Lowell’s elegies and Berryman’s Dreamsongs, and even an awkward commemoration on his The ...”

“... Edward the Confessor built the first abbey, next to his palace at Westminster, in 1042, and William the Conqueror became the first king to be crowned in it, on Christmas Day 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III ...”

“... knighted in 1980 for mysterious services to Britain, and is now revealed as Godfather to Prince William. Laurens van der Post has been many things: journalist, farmer, soldier, prisoner, author, traveller, film-maker. It appears he has now become the sage behind the throne. Sir Laurens was born in 1906, in the South African hinterland, of a Dutch father and ...”

“... commercial matters. The demand for his appointment had come from company factors in India such as William Biddulph, who in 1613 had underscored the need for an official ambassador who could correct the claims of Jesuit priests and Portuguese commercial rivals that the English were ‘a base people and dwell in a little island’. In practice, state and ...”

“... of it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas. And I had the tears start down the checks, and our minister smiled hack, and I no longer worried how it looked to others.’ As his voice broke, and he paused to dab ...”